Environmental Justice for Climate Refugees

Francesca Rosignoli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000584745
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias biológicas
• Subtopic: Calentamiento global y cambio climático

This book explores who climate refugees are and how environmental justice might be used to overcome legal obstacles preventing them from being recognized at an international level.

Francesca Rosignoli begins by exploring the conceptual and complex issues that surround the very existence of climate refugees and investigates the magnitude of the phenomenon in its current and future estimates. Reframing the debate using an environment justice perspective, she examines who has the responsibility of assisting climate refugees (state vs non-state actors), the various legal solutions available and the political scenarios that should be advanced in order to govern this issue in the long term. Overall, Environmental Justice for Climate Refugees presents a critical interrogation of how this specific strand of forced migration is currently categorized by existing legal, ethical and political definitions, and highlights the importance of applying a justice perspective to this issue.

Exploring the phenomenon of climate refugees through a multi-disciplinary lens, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental migration and displacement, environmental politics and governance, and refugee studies.

1“Climate Refugees” Toward the construction of a new subjectivity

DOI: 10.4324/9781003102632-1

Introduction

What is a “climate refugee”? Is this the right term to use? Are “climate refugees” an identifiable and “measurable” group of people? Even today, the answers to these questions remain controversial, mostly because of the heterogeneous and multicausal nature of climate-induced migration. Notably, evidence shows that different types of environmental degradation are likely to trigger different patterns of migration (Kälin & Schrepfer, 2012). To begin with, a first divide is between slow-onset and rapid-onset events.

Slow-onset events are characterized by adverse long-term impacts on the environment, such as sea-level rise, groundwater and soil salinization, droughts, and desertification. Options available to people affected by slow-onset events depend upon the stage of environmental degradation, ranging from staying, migrating or eventually escaping when compelled to. These strategies can be permanent or temporary, depending on circumstance and context. For example, Small Island Developing States (SIDS) represent a particular case of slow-onset disasters in the later stages of environmental degradation making them uninhabitable, the last-resort of planned relocations are becoming ever more frequent (Ionesco, 2017). By contrast, rapid-onset events such as floods, storms, hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones, and mudslides, all have negative short-term impacts making large-scale displacement the most common consequence. The immediacy of impact makes evacuation the only available option, this movement is however often temporary with a return made as soon as conditions allow.

Despite differences in climate migration patterns, there is a common denominator: people fleeing the impacts of environmental disruptions rarely cross state borders when migrating (Rigaud et al., 2018) and move within their country of origin as Internally displaced persons (IDPs) (Ionesco, 2017; Rigaud et al., 2018).¹ A further common element relies upon the multicausal nature of climate-induced migration. Environmental factors can and do co-exist with others such as unemployment, war, violence, and social networks in countries of destination, which work together as drivers for migration. Understanding how and to what extent these factors work together is one of the most pressing challenges to understanding factors influencing human mobility (McLeman & Gemenne, 2018).

To sum up, the multi-causal and heterogeneous nature of climate-induced migration implies that it must be viewed through the lens of space, time, and context. Not only do these factors offer a key to understanding migration but they also indicate the extent and likelihood of the affected population to survive, and therefore their legal status. Changes in people’s legal status are ultimately determined by municipalities adopting legal categories, the main questions are: Does the existing legal framework have the necessary tools to cope with a multi-causal and heterogenous phenomenon such as climate-induced migration? Is there a way out of the “legal impasse” that prevents from recognizing “climate refugees” as a new (legal) subjectivity? The chapter seeks to answer these questions by a genealogical examination of empirical controversies, terminological disputes, and struggles of major players competing for this emerging area of policymaking.

Methodology

This analysis is conducted through the genealogical method. In particular, I draw on the Foucauldian concept of subjugated knowledges conceived in its twofold understanding of historical contents and disqualified knowledges (Foucault, 1980, pp. 81–83).

On the one hand, the chapter uncovers historical contents buried in the governing approach of finding “technical solutions” to the perceived “refugee problem”: the persistent coloniality behind the dogmatic 1951 Refugee Convention. On the other hand, it challenges this approach by reactivating disqualified knowledges, which may open new (legal) subjectivities.

As such, this genealogical analysis proceeds along two axes: historical knowledge of struggles and the insurrection of knowledges.

As for the first axis, the chapter traces the history of struggles evolved out of empirical controversies, terminological disputes, and struggles of actors to conquer this new policymaking area.

The analysis of historical context is conducted through document-based research among the following secondary sources: research publications, research projects, official reports by international organizations and major agencies/institutions committed to the refugees/migrants, documents of proposals/ongoing initiatives to fill the legal gap, and documents/reports produced by non-governmental organizations. The references were located by systematically tracing sources cited in these documents found in libraries and internet searches. The choice of focusing on secondary sources to look at existing definitions and terms used is justified by the absence of a legal definition of “climate refugees.” The main findings of this genealogical examination are represented in Table 1.1 with no pretense of offering a fully comprehensive classification. It lists 15 labels referenced from among the many more consulted. The terms have been selected as relevant according to the principle of Entstehung (emergence), described by Foucault as “the principle and the singular law of an apparition” (Foucault, 1977, p. 148), i.e., the first time the different terms appeared. The primary aim is to show the emergence of the term, conceived as the moment of arising, its evolution over time, and the different scenes determining the nomenclature shift.

Table 1.1 A general survey of the dispute over terms and definitions in the “Climate Refugees” discourses.

Nomenclature	Author/Institution	Definition	Year
Ecological displaced persons	William Vogt	“The people – scores of millions of people – who are using the land in disregard of its capabilities are Displaced Persons in a much more serious sense than the few hundred thousand in European refugee camps. They are displaced in the ecological sense. They can feed and clothe themselves, and supply food, fibers, charcoal, and wood to cities only by destroying the land on which they live and resources associated with it… . Scores of millions of them must be moved – down the eroding slopes, out of the degenerating forests, off the overgrazed ranges – if they are not to drag ever lower the living standards of their respective countries – and the world. The solution of the problem of European DPs is simple in comparison with that of the ecological DPs” (Vogt, 1949, p. 107).	1948
Ecological Refugees	Lester Brown/World Watch Institute	“As human and livestock populations retreat before the expanding desert, these ecological refugees create even greater pressure on new fringe areas, exacerbate the processes of land degradation, and trigger a self-reinforcing negative cycle of overcrowding and overgrazing in successive areas. When the inevitable drought sets in, as one did in the early seventies, this deteriorating situation is brought to a disastrous climax for the humans who perish by the hundreds of thousands, for livestock, which die in even greater numbers, and for productive land, which is destroyed” (Brown et al., 1976, p. 39).	1976
Economic Refugees	Kathleen Newland	“Throughout history people have been driven from their homes by wars or ecological catastrophes … The voluntarism of these migrants’ moves may be qualified by desperation and lack of alternatives, yet the force that expels them is usually not the force of arms but rather the force of circumstance. They are, in a sense, economic refugees” (Newland, 1979, p. 5).	1981
Environmental Refugees	Essam El-Hinnawi	Those people “who have been forced to leave their traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of a marked environmental disruption (natural and/or triggered by people) that jeopardized their existence and/or seriously affected the quality of their life” (El-Hinnawi, 1985, p. 4).	1985
Environmental migrant	Astri Suhrke and Annamaria Visentin	Environmental migrant is a person who “makes a voluntary, rational decision to leave a region as the situation gradually worsens there. In that decision, environmental deterioration may be only one factor among others” (Suhrke & Visentin, 1991, p. 73).	1991
Environmentally displaced persons	Reinhard Lohrmann United Nations High Commissioner For Refugees (UNHCR), International Organization for Migration (IOM), Refugee Policy group (RPG)	Environmentally displaced persons are “those who can no longer gain a livelihood in their homelands because of soil erosion, deforestation, desertification, drought, chemical contamination or other related collapses in natural carrying capacity, whether short-term or long-term. Not all environmentally displaced persons flee their countries (many remain internally displaced), but a key feature is that they move because they have no other choice” (Lohrmann, 1996, pp. 335–336).	1996
Ecomigrants	William B. Wood	“Ecomigrants, unlike ‘environmental refugees,’ are not necessarily violently displaced. They are close...